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Extra-Household Norms And Intra-Household Bargaining: Gender In Sudan And Burkina Faso, Michael Kevane

Economics

This paper argues that future empirical strategies for approaching the problem of deepening relative poverty for women in sub-Saharan Africa might focus on distinguishing and weighing two complementary determinants of the process. One determinant is the changing distribution of intra-household bargaining power. The other determinant is the changing constellation of social norms that constrain and regulate the economic activities of women. The paper shows how fruitful this dichotomization may be in the context of an analysis of women's economic activities in western Sudan and south-western Burkina Faso. In western Sudan the military regime deliberately brought about changes, at the very …